‘By Jove!’ he gasped.  ‘Who’d a’ thought it!  The little witch!  Why my sister—­’ ‘Is an English girl,’ interrupted Malemute Kid, ’with an English foot.  This girl comes of a small-footed race.  Moccasins just broadened her feet healthily, while she did not misshape them by running with the dogs in her childhood.’  But this explanation failed utterly to allay Prince’s admiration.  Harrington’s commercial instinct was touched, and as he looked upon the exquisitely turned foot and ankle, there ran through his mind the sordid list—­’One rifle, one blanket, twenty bottles of hooch.’  Madeline was the wife of a king, a king whose yellow treasure could buy outright a score of fashion’s puppets; yet in all her life her feet had known no gear save red-tanned moosehide.  At first she had looked in awe at the tiny white-satin slippers; but she had quickly understood the admiration which shone, manlike, in the eyes of the men.  Her face flushed with pride.  For the moment she was drunken with her woman’s loveliness; then she murmured, with increased scorn, ‘And one rifle, broke!’ So the training went on.  Every day Malemute Kid led the girl out on long walks devoted to the correction of her carriage and the shortening of her stride.

There was little likelihood of her identity being discovered, for Cal Galbraith and the rest of the Old-Timers were like lost children among the many strangers who had rushed into the land.  Besides, the frost of the North has a bitter tongue, and the tender women of the South, to shield their cheeks from its biting caresses, were prone to the use of canvas masks.  With faces obscured and bodies lost in squirrel-skin parkas, a mother and daughter, meeting on trail, would pass as strangers.

The coaching progressed rapidly.  At first it had been slow, but later a sudden acceleration had manifested itself.  This began from the moment Madeline tried on the white-satin slippers, and in so doing found herself.  The pride of her renegade father, apart from any natural self-esteem she might possess, at that instant received its birth.  Hitherto, she had deemed herself a woman of an alien breed, of inferior stock, purchased by her lord’s favor.  Her husband had seemed to her a god, who had lifted her, through no essential virtues on her part, to his own godlike level.  But she had never forgotten, even when Young Cal was born, that she was not of his people.  As he had been a god, so had his womenkind been goddesses.  She might have contrasted herself with them, but she had never compared.

It might have been that familiarity bred contempt; however, be that as it may, she had ultimately come to understand these roving white men, and to weigh them.